Thursday, Jan. 23. 2003: 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Michael C. Carlos Museum
Reception Hall (3rd floor)
Book signing: 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Judith Martin, author of the Miss Manners newspaper column
carried in more than 200 newspapers in the United States and
abroad, will speak at Emory University on Thursday, Jan. 23.
Her visit is sponsored by the Emory Center on Myth and Ritual
in American Life (MARIAL). She will speak from 3 p.m. to 5
p.m. in the 3rd floor reception hall of the Michael C. Carlos
Museum on the Emory campus. A book-signing is scheduled for
2 p.m. at the Carlos Museum.
"Who better to discuss the power of everyday ritual in
the lives of Americans than Miss Manners," said MARIAL
Center Director Bradd Shore. "Anyone who thinks they
are going to simply get a guide to which fork to use at dinner
may well be in for an exciting surprise."
Miss Manners examines the historical roots of American manners
in her most recent book, Star Spangled Manners: In Which
Miss Manners Defends American Etiquette (For a Change).
Shore said it is a "powerful analysis of the peculiarly
self-conscious egalitarian context within which a distinctive
tradition of American manners developed."
Shore notes that in her book, she discusses how "this
American vision of manners" has been shaped by the conditions
of contemporary home and work life, which is of particular
interest to the MARIAL Center.
The MARIAL Center is a Sloan Center on Working Families, funded
by the New York-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It studies
how middle-class families manage the challenges of family
life when both parents work. MARIAL researchers focus on the
role of myth and ritual - from everyday routine to celebratory
ritual - in the making and reproduction of family culture.
MARIAL's working premise is that each family has to produce
a distinct micro-culture for its members, which is a unique
combination of general American family traditions plus the
particular traditions of each parent. This task is significantly
affected by the fact that taking care of the family and making
a home is not anyone's full-time job in today's working families.
Miss Manners' column has chronicled the rise and fall of American
manners since 1978. In her columns and books, she explains
the etiquette element present in nearly every aspect of life
and explores etiquette's philosophical underpinnings. Martin
is also a novelist, a journalist, and, as the nation's leading
civility expert, a frequent lecturer and guest on national
television and radio shows. As a reporter, feature writer,
and critic, she spent 25 years at the Washington Post,
where she was one of the original contributors to the "Style"
and "Weekend" sections. Martin is a graduate of
Wellesley College.
Shore, a cultural anthropologist, has been teaching and studying
ritual for 30 years. He believes that etiquette is the ritualization
of social relations, and is far more important than most people
realize, despite the fact that the term etiquette seems to
suggest to some a superficial veneer of stilted behavior.
"Since the inception of the MARIAL Center, I have thought
that Judith Martin would be a perfect, if somewhat unusual,
speaker for our colloquium series," Shore said. "Her
view of etiquette is actually very close to what social scientists
like Erving Goffman call "interaction ritual." It's
more reminiscent of the French notion of moeurs - encompassing
both formal manners and tacit norms of social life - than
it is a handbook of table etiquette."
The MARIAL Center supports a variety of faculty and student
projects including:
- Family life at the edge of flex time: families of flight
attendants;
- Story-telling and the transmission of family traditions
in
working families;
- Physiological stress-markers as a function of different
styles
of family routine;
- African-American family reunions;
- Family ritual and celebrations over the year;
- The historical emergence of middle-class culture and etiquette
in the mid-19th century in Hancock County, Georgia.
